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He could very likely have appealed for leniency. At least he could have saved his life by agreeing to leave Athens. But had he done this he would not have been Socrates. He valued his conscience--and the truth-- higher than life.

Jostein Gaarder

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Jostein Gaarder
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: August 8
Author
Novelist
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Oslo
Norway
Would
Likely
Life
Saved
Conscience
Leniency
Higher
Agreeing
Leave
Appealed
Least
Athens
Truth
Socrates
Done
Valued

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We can't own each other's past. The questioin is whether we have a future together.
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It was all too easy to make things up, it was like skating on thin ice, it was like doing dainty pirouettes on a brittle crust over water thousands of fathoms deep.
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Athens is like a sluggish horse, and I am the gadfly trying to sting it into life.
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Although you may not stumble across a Martian in the garden, you might stumble across yourself. The day that happens, you'll probably also scream a little. And that'll be perfectly all right, because it's not every day you realize you're a living planet dweller on a little island in the universe.
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Every single morning I wake with a bang,' he said. 'It's as though the fact that I am alive is injected into me I am a character in a fairytale, bursting with life.
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The sophists were as a rule men who had traveled widely and seen different forms of government. Both conventions and local laws in the city-states could vary widely. This led the Sophists to raise the question of what was natural and what was socially induced. By doing this, they paved the way for social criticism in the city-state of Athens.
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I am really more interested in questions than in giving answers.
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Wisest is she who knows she does not know.
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Then you have a big problem, because a human is a thinking animal. If you don't think, you're not really a human.
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All beauty that surrounds us must one day perish.
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There is no order of things except in the human mind.
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Yes, we too are stardust.
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When you realize there is something you don't understand, then you're generally on the right path to understanding all kinds of things.
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For nature is good, an man is 'by nature' good it is civilization which ruins him
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Philosophy is the opposite of fairy tales
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The most subversive people are those who ask questions.
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We are thrown together with a sprinkling of stardust.
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As a Roman philosopher, Cicero, said of him a few hundred years later, Socrates 'called philosophy down from the sky and established her in the towns and introduced her into homes and forced her to investigate life, ethics, good and evil.
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Hegel said that `truth` is subjective, thus rejecting the existence of any `truth` above or beyond human reason. All knowledge is human knowledge.
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